Urban--rural link (URL), a popular land use policy among Chinese local governments, allows urban development of the same or a smaller area than peasants' house sites that are converted back into farmland. It is often regarded as a form of transfer of development rights (TDR). Based on detailed...

Private communities in Chinese cities are under various constraints from the government. The <italic>ex ante</italic> constraints set limits on how the homeowners association (HOA) can be designed and set up. The <italic>ex post</italic> constraints affect the operation of the HOA. It is argued that these constraints reduce the...

By examining several different types of open institutions including open source software, open science, open square and (open) urban planning, this paper presents a general analysis of open institutional structure that is complementary to traditional proprietary mode. We argue that open...

By comparing the development of landownership in China and England, this paper explores what were behind their different trajectories. In particular, I examined the delineation of property rights, alienation of land, rent and tax, inheritance and accumulation of land. Feudal England was a...

Coase originally formulated his conjecture about intertemporal price competition in the context of a land market, but it has been applied almost exclusively to non-spatial markets. This paper revisits the Coase Conjecture in the context of land development and urban institutions. I compare four...

This article draws on the ongoing reconstruction in Wenchuan earthquake areas and studies how a new world of private property rights affects post-disaster reconstruction. In addition to analysing particular problems related to rural housing, urban housing and housing finance, I argue that (1)...

This article presents an integrated analysis of China's emerging urban institutions, and especially of how they respond to the fundamental change in property rights regime. In the last decade, homeowners' associations have been booming in Chinese cities, while the Ministry of Civil Affairs has...